During the past two decades, there has emerged a growing need to reconsider the objects, axioms and perspectives of writing music history. A certain suspicion towards Francois Lyotard's grand narratives, as a sign of what he diagnosed as our 'postmodern condition', has become more or less an established and unquestioned point of departure among historians. This suspicion, at its most extreme, has led to a radical conclusion of the 'end of history' in the work of postmodern scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and Francis Fukuyama. The contributors to Critical Music Historiography take a step back and argue that the radical view of the 'impossibility of history', as well as the unavoidable ideology of any history, are counter-productive points of departure for historical scholarship. It is argued that metanarratives in history are still possible and welcome, even if their limitations are acknowledged. Foucault, Lyotard and others should be taken into account but systematized viewpoints and methods for a more critical and multi-faceted re-evaluation of the past through research are needed. As to the metanarratives of music history, they must avoid the pitfalls of evolutionism, hagiography, and teleology, all hallmarks of traditional historiography. In this volume the contributors put these methods and principles into practice. The chapters tackle under-researched and non-conventional domains of music history as well as rethinking older historiographical concepts such as orientalism and nationalism, and consequently introduce new concepts such as occidentalism and transnationalism. The volume is a challenging collection of work that stakes out a unique territory for itself among the growing body of work on critical music history.
About the Author: Markus Mantere graduated with a PhD in Music from Brown University, USA. His dissertation scrutinized the music philosophy of the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, as well as the impact that Gould's exceptional musicianship has had on later generations of musicians in Canada and the Western musical world. More recently, Mantere's research on the scholarly criticism of music has focused on the intellectual and social history of musicology in Finland. He has also worked as the editor of Musiikki, the only refereed musicological journal in Finland, since 2007. Vesa Kurkela is Professor of Music History at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland. He has written extensively on various topics of music history in Finland and elsewhere: popular music, music publishing, nationalism and transnationalism, folk music and ideology, concert institution and orchestral repertoires, radio music, and recording industry.